


The Laws of Physics

by fuzzballsheltiepants



Series: High School Science [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Adoptive mother!Bee, Alternate Universe - High School, Fluff, Kissing, M/M, demi!neil josten
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-11 06:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17441549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuzzballsheltiepants/pseuds/fuzzballsheltiepants
Summary: Six weeks after taking Andrew to prom, Neil still isn't sure quite where things stand.  All he does know is that he really, really likes kissing Andrew Minyard.





	The Laws of Physics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beka2305 (CurvedYellowFruit)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurvedYellowFruit/gifts).



> Prompt from @elidethewise/beka2305, who suggested a High School AU slice of life, maybe in the Chemistry Experiments universe. Hopefully this satisfies! A little bit of mild anxiety from Neil and a reference to a past car wreck. Unbetaed because I'm lazy.

Neil surreptitiously rubbed his sweaty palms against his shorts.  He didn’t know why he felt like this, why there were hamsters doing the macarena in his stomach.  It was just Andrew, after all. Just his lab partner...who he had spent the last month of school kissing at every possible opportunity.

After another deep breath he got out of the car and headed up the walk.  He could do this. They were just going to hang out, probably play a few video games or something.  Just because it was at Andrew’s house and not school didn’t mean anything. Just because he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Andrew, or texting Andrew, for the past two weeks while Uncle Stuart dragged him all across the country to tour colleges—well, maybe that meant something.

Shit.

It was tempting to turn back, get in his car, and just...drive.  Which was pretty fucking weird, given that cars still gave him anxiety, years after the crash that had claimed his mother and twenty percent of his skin.  His hand drifted to the worst of his burn scars on his chest and he forced it back to his pocket where it belonged. Somehow his feet had continued moving, and he found himself on the porch, with its homey rockers and pristine flower boxes overflowing with primary colors.  

Swallowing hard to try to drown the creatures that now seemed to have found some sort of trampoline on his stomach lining, he knocked and waited.  The door opened with a flash of blond hair, and Neil started to smile until he recognized Aaron, not Andrew.

“He’s upstairs.”  Aaron’s tone was as flat as his brother’s, but there was something edging it, a sourness Neil had never heard from Andrew.  It took Aaron a second to step back enough for Neil to get through the door, and he still didn’t move enough out of the way, forcing Neil to bump his shoulder to make it into the house.

It was a lit match to Neil’s ready temper.  His nerves went up in the flames that kindled, and he almost reveled in the burning.  “What the hell, Aaron?”

“What?”  Aaron crossed his arms, glaring in the vicinity of Neil’s ear rather than his eyes.  

Before Neil could snap at him, their mother appeared, wiping her hands on an apron that fit so perfectly with her kind face and generous curves as to be almost cliche.  He almost choked trying to swallow the words, and Dr. Dobson didn’t miss it, her eyes flickering to Aaron. “Hello, Neil, it’s good to see you. How has your summer been so far?”

He was stuttering out something stupid and ordinary when noise on the stairs had him turning around in desperate relief.  Andrew wasn’t even looking at him; his eyes were fixed on his twin, his mouth tightening at whatever he read on Aaron’s face.  Dr. Dobson cleared her throat, and when Andrew turned to her she handed him a tray with sodas and cookies before shooing him away.  Neil followed Andrew up the stairs slowly, mulling over Aaron’s odd behavior. They had always gotten along fairly well; Neil’s friendship with Katelyn predated Aaron’s claim as her boyfriend so he had kind of been accepted by default.  

The upstairs hallway was bright, with tasteful artwork lining the walls.  A bass was pounding from a room at the end, and Neil hesitated for just a second before following Andrew through the doorway.

He didn’t know what he expected, but the moderate chaos that greeted him was not it.  One wall was painted with that chalkboard paint, and there were sketches and random sentences covering it.  Books covered everything, to the point where he had to pick his way across the floor. There was a desk overflowing with more books and notebooks, and a laptop open to Spotify.  The bed looked like it belonged in a different room, perfectly neat with everything tucked in tightly. Andrew set the tray in the center before dropping down next to the pillows.  

Neil glanced around, uncertain where to sit.  The chair by the desk had, of course, books stacked on it, as well as a hoodie that had been tossed so it was barely clinging by an arm to the back.  That left the foot of the bed, but the idea of sitting on Andrew’s bed made the hamsters in his stomach rise up from the ashes like hyperactive phoenixes.  

“What the fuck is going on with you?”

With a guilty start, Neil looked at Andrew, who had a strange expression on his face.  “Sorry. I—sorry.”

“It’s a bed.  Sit on it or don’t, it’s not worth the existential crisis.”

“Asshole,” Neil said, but he couldn’t help but smile as he perched on the foot.   Andrew whacked him with a pillow, hard enough Neil yelped before yanking it away and tucking it against the wall behind him.  It was the perfect vantage point for the TV perched on the bureau against the far wall.

“Wanna watch something?” Andrew asked.  “Or play something?”

There was a game console next to the TV, and Neil spotted controllers on the nightstand.  He shrugged; he didn’t know how to explain that he had never gotten into movies or games, first because his mother wouldn’t let him and now because it mostly seemed like a lot of pointless noise.  Andrew was still waiting for a response, but instead Neil asked, “You read all these books?”

“Nah, I just have them for the aesthetic.”

“Oh.”

Andrew scoffed.  “Yes, dumbass, I’ve read them all.  Except the ones on the chair, Bee just brought those home.”

“Why do you call your mother Bee?”

Andrew picked up one of the cookies from the tray but didn’t eat it.  “It’s her name.” Neil rolled his eyes and Andrew shrugged. “She adopted us what, like, four years ago?  I don’t know, we were thirteen, it felt weird to call her anything else.” He looked at the cookie and huffed a laugh.  “She could be a little less obvious.”

Neil leaned over to look.  “What do you mean?”

Andrew showed him the flower-shaped cookie, some sort of artfully decorated masterpiece that Neil would be afraid to eat.  Andrew had no such compunction, breaking off a petal and stuffing it in his mouth. “She only breaks out the piping bag when she’s stress-baking.”

“Huh.  My mom never did that.  Actually, she couldn’t really cook.  She’d heat up a can of Chef Boyardee and call it good.”

“Mm, I had a foster mother like that.  I ate more mac and cheese that year than I want to for the rest of my life.  And it wasn’t like, the good mac and cheese, it was the discount brand shit.”

Neil nodded; he could practically taste the chemicals just from talking about it.  He wondered, then, if this was the strange draw he felt. Just the...Knowing, of how painful and shitty and just pointlessly cruel life could be.  But he didn’t want to think about that, about the little fragments of Andrew’s history that he had heard over the years and the vast chasm he had never been told but thought he might know anyway.  “Can I kiss you?”

Andrew raised an eyebrow at him and swallowed his bite of cookie.  “Is that why you wanted to come over?”

“No.”  It wasn’t the full truth, but it wasn’t a lie, either.  Two weeks without kissing Andrew had felt like exile. But maybe that was just two weeks away from his acerbic presence, Neil wasn’t even sure.  He had missed him, as absurd as that was; missed the teasing insults, the quick brain, the way Andrew saw through him and called out every ounce of his bullshit.  Kissing was just kind of a bonus.

He didn’t miss the way Andrew’s eyes dropped to his mouth.  With a slow grace that reminded him of a stalking cat, Andrew moved the tray onto the floor then shifted so he was kneeling next to Neil, not a hand’s breadth separating them.  “Yes?”

“Yes.”

Neil was no stranger to kissing, but until Andrew it had never seemed real.  He had always felt like an actor in a bad school play, going through the motions with whatever overly enthusiastic costar was sharing the stage at that moment.  That was his whole life, really; trying to get through without a script, when everyone else knew the lines.

Or maybe more like falling from an airplane, the crowd below gasping and applauding as he did aerial somersaults and spins, all of them confident that he would eventually pull the cord and float down on his parachute.  But he knew that there was no parachute, just a plain backpack, and his only hope for survival was to fight the laws of physics and stay afloat, even as he longed for the barely-remembered feel of grass under his feet.

But Andrew—Andrew was so fully on solid ground that he kept Neil there too.  There was something so unshakably honest about him: the rough/chapped feel of his lips, the strong fingers in his hair, the way he tackled kissing head on, without apology or false modesty.  Yet though he was unmoveable, he was not unmoved. No; not when he had to pull away slightly to rest his forehead against Neil’s, their breath mingling and his hands toying gently with the short hairs at the back of Neil’s neck.  Not when Neil brushed his lips against Andrew’s throat and earned a full-body shiver in return.

“I wish Uncle Stuart hadn’t suddenly gotten a hardon for colleges,” Neil murmured.  “It was stupid, flying all over the country just to listen to the same stupid spiel at half a dozen different places.”  He kissed Andrew’s neck again, suddenly aware he can feel Andrew’s pulse through his lips. “I’d rather have just been here.  With you.” He felt like he was handing Andrew the hilt of a knife whose blade was poised between his ribs.

“Don’t say stupid things.”  But the hoarseness of Andrew’s voice kept the knife from digging in, and Neil smiled into his neck.   _I could stay like this all day_ , he thought, and wondered at the warmth that coursed through his veins.

They spent the afternoon alternating between kissing and talking.  Andrew called up some of his favorite videos on Youtube and Neil laughed at the weird silliness of them until his abs hurt.  Eventually he took over the laptop and pulled up a short, watching Andrew more than the screen, the minute changes of expression from disbelief to outrage to total amusement.  “What the actual fuck?”

“I know, right?”  Neil laughed. “Uncle Stuart has this whole collection of these.  He calls them British classics.”

“What I want to know is, what drugs were they taking when they made that, and are they available in the U.S.?”

Neil laughed again, letting his hand drop on Andrew’s feet where they rested in his lap.  He didn’t really know what to do with the easy familiarity of this, but he kind of liked it.  “I wish we could just do this all summer.”

Andrew glanced at his feet, then up at Neil’s face.  “You have some kind of foot kink I should know about?”

“You know what I mean.”  It came out sharper than he meant it, and he looked away.  He didn’t know why he always did this, why he always let his temper get the best of him.  Uncle Stuart always said he’d inherited it from the father he’d never known, but Neil thought that was kind of a copout.

“I don’t care about your foot kink,” Andrew said, pulling him out of his thoughts  “I mean, I already knew about your secondhand smoke kink, so I guess it’s kind of fitting.”  He nudged Neil with one of the feet in question. “Maybe it’s a stink kink.”

Neil’s mouth was twitching up of its own accord.  “Yeah, well, that explains…” He trailed off when Andrew shifted, so close all his words disappeared.  And then Andrew’s hands were back in his hair and his mouth was on his, and Neil’s thoughts followed his words into the void.

“I do know what you mean,” Andrew said some time later.  Pink was creeping up the back of his neck to his ears, and Neil wanted to kiss the flushed skin.

“So why don’t we?  I mean, I know we both have our stupid jobs, but after.”

Andrew was looking up at him through his lashes, every inch of him golden in the warm late afternoon light that was drifting through the window.  Even his eyelashes were tipped in gold; Neil wondered how he had never noticed that before. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't really planning on writing more in this AU but now I want to do something more with Aaron. Sigh. I am never going to be finished writing stuff for these boys! Anyway, comments and kudos are greatly appreciated!


End file.
